Books Burn Badly

The Lucky Gambler

IT WAS THE first time Alberte Pementa had gambled but, when he sat down, he had the impression that game of cards with Raúl Cotón had been foretold years previously. There was a strange sense of expectation in the bar in Brandariz. Fiz, the waiter, arranged the tablecloth as if for an autopsy and brought the cards with all the care of someone laying down a weapon. Cotón was playing and that spelt only one thing: disaster.

‘These cards have got Morse on the back,’ joked Pementa.

‘I’ve no problem with them,’ said Cotón.

‘Then I haven’t either.’

‘Shut the door. Make yourselves comfortable. Gentlemen, we’re outside the law. And bring us a bird,’ Cotón told Fiz.

‘A bird? Please not.’

‘Don’t grumble. We need to know the time.’

‘There’s a clock on the wall.’

‘Bring us a bird. The bird is time.’

Fiz came back with a starling inside a cage. Placed it on the side of the table.

‘What’s its name?’ Pementa asked.

‘Figaro.’

‘The last one was called Figaro,’ Cotón remarked.

‘Yes. But the last one died. Smoked to death in a cage.’

Cotón stopped shuffling and stared at Pementa. Offered him a cigarette.

‘You’d better smoke. You know the condition?’

‘What condition?’

‘No one leaves till the bird is dead.’

Alberte Pementa was a lucky man. He’d always been lucky. The night he arrived at the bar in Brandariz, he opened the door, looked down at the ground and found a 500-peseta note. A blue note. Lots of money at that time. Some people had never seen a note that colour before. It was a Saturday night and the bar was full of men, almost all of them building labourers letting off steam after a week’s work in the city. The smoke of Celtas gave conversations a structured consistency, though there was also the odd flourish of someone smoking a Tip Top, Portuguese blond. Each to his own, nobody noticed him. Until he bent down and stood up with that note in his hand like an oriflamme. The first look of congratulation gave way to a general feeling of resentment. Why should Pementa have found it soon as he came through the door? Why?

‘Things look at us,’ Pementa attempted a justification. ‘We don’t look at them.’

Pementa’s remark was considered witty, but not without pride. At this late hour, on the back of several rounds, people were highly sensitive to signs. What was so special about Pementa that notes should look at him?

‘It’s just that the man is lucky,’ said Fiz. ‘That’s all.’

Everyone understood that Pementa had been very lucky. But such luck should be shared around. It couldn’t discriminate in this way, pull a fast one on people who’d always lived there. People who were from the place. Where’d Pementa come from? Another village, on horseback. All he’d done was arrive and fill up.

‘Somebody might be missing that note, I dare say.’

The person who made this observation was Raúl Cotón, who egged the others on with his look.

Everybody checked their pockets, their wallets, but no one claimed back the note. They might have been resentful, but they were honest.

‘Well, I say that note’s as much yours as it’s mine,’ insisted Cotón. Pementa understood. His horse was outside, tied to the hitching-rail, and he’d only stopped for a drink to shake off the night dew. It would give him great pleasure to share his luck with those present, in a toast to the parish’s deceased. There was a murmur of approval. Here was a gentleman, a tavern prince. But Cotón broke the accord. What was under discussion was not the note, an accidental factor, but the possession of Luck with a capital letter, which Cotón, in a hoarse, forceful, brandy-laden voice, raised to the rank of virgin or goddess, Our Lady of Luck, whose favour had to be decided here, this night and no other.

Pementa didn’t mind playing for luck. He wasn’t superstitious.

‘You ever been unlucky?’ asked Cotón, who seemed to speak not through his mouth, but through the weal across his cheekbone.

‘I camp out under my own star. Where I do not run, I don’t grow tired.’

‘Well, I cut the air with a sickle. I’m fed up of treading shit and am going to unwalk the wheel. Let’s see those cards! I’m going to get your three, Pementa! Understand?’ growled Cotón in the direction of the Brandariz public.

They played and all Pementa did was lose.

First off, what he had to hand, the money. Then his horse at the door. His belt. His riding boots. Followed by his property. His mother’s inheritance. Her jewellery, the toad necklace and filigree earrings, the bedhead made of chestnut wood and carved with roses. Finally the chest. ‘You going to bet the chest?’ ‘I’ve still got something. St Anthony of Padua.’ ‘How can you bet poor little old Anthony? The saint everyone loves, the matchmaker, the one who looks after the herd.’

‘He wants a bullet in his head,’ remarked a parishioner. ‘Betting St Anthony!’

‘Anyone else can shut up or provide tobacco,’ said Cotón.

The lucky gambler lost St Anthony as well. He was ashamed. Not just because of what the living would say, but because of what the dead might think. Enough. He’d lost everything.

‘Your turn in the dance.’

‘What?’

‘You’ve still got your turn in the dance.’

‘It’s not a cow, I can’t bet that.’

‘I want your turn.’

Pementa knew very well what this meant. For months now, he’d been dancing with the same girl in the fixed corner, where you didn’t have to give way in the dance. It was a kind of preserve. In the rest of the room, you had to give way. However content the couple might be, in the rest of the room, a local boy’s request to step in for the slow dance had to be granted without further ado. A round that is not over until the couple formalises their relationship. Makes it clear they’re serious. The fixed corner was the preserve of seriousness. The obligation to make way is an arbitrary rule, often irritating, but it leads to surprises, constant traffic, so that there’s much more hullabaloo, whereas in the territory of those ‘on speaking terms’ there is safety in silence. The most ardent lovers bend and bow, hope to reach the light without getting burnt, like moths around a lamp, and, if we glance in their direction, they’re trying out new symmetries that show a willingness to exchange bodies. There’s a moment at the end of the number when a fiery couple seems to have swapped facial and bodily features to such an extent that, being of a different size, they’ve suddenly acquired the same stature. This interchange is beneficial. They’re both more beautiful after the dance. But there are some who, in the formality of their engagement, suddenly grow cold, like bronze poured into a mould. They dance to each tune with a correctness that makes them all the same, be it a bolero or a paso doble, as if they were in fact doing the housework. Alberte Pementa and his girl belonged not to these, but to the first kind. Being ‘on speaking terms’ should be understood in the widest sense. Because speaking to each other implied carnal knowledge. They were either engaged or on the way to being so. Which was not just a verbal undertaking, but a bodily promise.

‘You going to bet your turn?’

‘Shut it,’ said Cotón. ‘It’s the right to dance.’

‘He wants a kick in the balls,’ said the parishioner.

After that, Pementa had only one thing left. Luck.

Time was running out. The starling in the cage was showing signs of suffocating amid so much smoke. Its death signalled the end of the game. And the bird seemed to know it. Motionless on its perch, it had a grave look, like an animal in a fable.

‘I’ve nothing left,’ said Pementa. ‘Not even a horse. I’ll have to walk.’

‘Yes, you have,’ said Cotón with the same voice, the same desire as in the first game.

‘What’s that?’

‘Luck.’

‘Go to bed, Cotón,’ said a local, hoping to do him a favour. ‘You’ve won everything. Don’t weigh using the devil’s scales.’

‘Calamity, why don’t you go and see if it’s raining.’

They played for luck. Cotón concentrated harder than ever. He’d had a magnificent night. Game after game, he’d beaten Pementa. And now he was going to deprive him of luck.

From the first card, it was obvious the wind had changed. Luck loved Pementa, or it didn’t love Cotón, one way or the other.

Which is why Alberte Pementa decided to leave. Ashamed at having betted love and kept luck. I don’t know what happened that day, what mist got inside his head. But even his friends stayed away from him. He must have been lucky because, just before embarking in Coruña, Santa Catarina, he found a thousand pesetas on the ground. There were lots of people, some whose job it was to do just that, catch anything that might fall out, so to speak, but Pementa found the money as soon as he arrived. Though his head was bowed, his soul in the doldrums. This may have helped him.

Adela, the local soothsayer, with a black bandage over her eyes, said, ‘Don’t let that man embark! No one should leave a city who finds notes on the ground.’ But Alberte Pementa thought differently. He thought the opposite. He thought he should leave at once.

‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ said O.

And Pementa whispered in her ear, ‘It’s true, girl.’